Vanished - A Mystery (Dixon & Baudin Book 1) (12 page)

24

When Baudin woke up in the morning, his daughter was gone. Panic seeped in, and he searched the house. He was on the phone with Molly when he suddenly remembered that she had soccer practice, and it was his neighbor Rachel’s turn to drive the girls out.

His head pounded as he took a shower. Afterward, he took a thousand milligrams of ibuprofen and had some coffee, the only thing he ever had for breakfast. Two cups later, he felt awake, and he read a few articles on the Philosopher’s Mail website and then headed out.

He picked up more coffee and some bagels and cream cheese at a bagel shop before driving to the Motel 6. The parking lot in daylight was nearly empty. He parked, got out, and headed to Candi’s room. She answered before he’d even knocked.

“You brought me breakfast?” she said.

“Just coffee and bagels.” He eased past her into the motel room. Setting the coffee and bagels down on the only table in the room, he noticed a copy of a check, signed by a name that wasn’t Candi’s.

“Check fraud,” he said. “I didn’t see a working girl like you as white collar.”

“It’s my uncle’s.”

He didn’t speak or move, just held her gaze.

“Fine, it’s mine. I got bills to pay, and how the hell am I supposed to work all cut up like this?”

Baudin sat down at the table. He’d brought two coffees, and he took his and sipped at it. “I wasn’t judging.”

“So you ain’t gonna bust me for it?”

“I’m not the check squad.” He slipped out his pack of Luckies, lit one, and told himself he had to remember to pick up some more matches. “I tried to speak to Dazzle last night, but they said she wasn’t out there.”

“She was. They’re scared of her. She can get really mean. The younger girls are all scared shitless.”

“Are you?”

“Nah,” she said, grabbing a bagel and flopping onto the edge of the bed. “She leaves me alone. She knows I been in the game a long time.”

“
The game
. Funny you would call it that. Does it feel like a game?”

“I don’t need a lecture ’bout what I do.”

The coffee was already cold, and he flipped the lid upside down on the table to use as an ashtray. “No lecture. I’m just curious what it feels like.”

“Why do you care?” she said, with her mouth full of bagel.

“My mother was a prostitute. At least, I think. She left me on the doorstep of a police station when I was six months or so. Just always been curious about what it’s like to be out there on the streets.”

She chewed a bit and then said, “It’s hell. But that’s life, ain’t it?”

He shrugged, dropping ash into the lid. “Fuck if I know.”

She looked him up and down. “So you gonna catch this guy, or what?”

“I don’t know. Depends how much Dazzle can help me.”

“Well, she’ll be out on the corners whenever it gets dark. She’s got a couple of girls who work for her, and she takes the higher-end tricks. The ones who drive up in BMWs and Infinities.”

He put his cigarette out and rose. “Just wanted to check in on you.”

“Ain’t you sweet.”

“Sweet as molasses.” He laid his card on the table. “That has my cell. If you see Dazzle here, you call me.”

As he was leaving, she came to the door and said, “Ethan?”

“Yeah?”

“Ain’t no one ever been nice to me. Especially no cop.”

He turned and walked away without replying.

The Spillman database, exclusively accessible by law enforcement, had just about everything the police could want to find out about a person. Baudin hadn’t yet been assigned a new login with the Cheyenne PD, but he still had his old one from the LAPD. He accessed it from the app on his phone and typed in the name “Ted Holdman.” Several addresses came back, all of Holdman’s businesses and his home address on Blueberry Hill.

Baudin put the home address into the GPS and drove up to Blueberry Hill, which must’ve been the upper-income neighborhood: no graffiti on the walls, convenience stores without bars on their doors and windows. Maybe all of Cheyenne was like that; he didn’t know. He hadn’t seen enough of it yet. But this area at least was the opposite of South Central Los Angeles, where he’d worked as a beat cop.

The Holdman residence had a horseshoe driveway, and he drove right up to the door and parked. The trees and bushes were trimmed well, the grass freshly cut. He could hear a sprinkler on in the back.

He climbed the steps to the front door and pounded on it with his fist. A moment later, an older man with a beard answered. Baudin recognized him as Ted Holdman from the photos on Spillman.

Before Holdman opened his mouth, Baudin popped him: one solid left in the nose that sent the man’s head snapping back. Baudin slammed his fist into the man’s kidneys before spinning him around and into his wall, his head causing a dent in the plaster before he flew onto his back.

A woman screamed—he guessed Holdman’s wife. Baudin climbed on top of him and slammed his fist into the man’s face again.

“You like cutting girls? Huh? You like cutting fucking girls?”

He punched him again, so hard he heard his nose crack. Grabbing Holdman by the collar, he pulled him near. “You ever go near those girls again, I’ll put a bullet in your fucking skull.”

Baudin rose and caught the eyes of the wife. She was holding her robe closed, her toenails freshly painted. The ring on her finger was the size of a decent strawberry.

“Excuse me, ma’am.”

He headed home to pick up Heather and go to Dixon’s house.

25

The car was silent as Baudin drove. Heather sat in the passenger seat with earbuds in, listening to music that Baudin couldn’t hear. Which wasn’t good; it meant she didn’t want him to hear.

“What’re you listening to?” he asked. She ignored him, and he pulled the earbuds out. “What’re you listening to?”

“Just some band.”

“Some band?”

“Yeah. You wouldn’t know them.”

A minute of silence followed.
But at least she didn’t put her earbuds back in
. “I ever tell you I was in a band?”

“No,” she said, staring out the window.

He glanced at her. “Are you not interested at all in what instrument I played or what kind of music it was?”

“Sure, Dad, I would love to know what type of music your shitty band played.”

“Hey, what the hell is the matter with you? Ever since we came out here you’ve had a damn attitude like I’m just some jerkoff for you to talk down to.”

“Whatever.”

“No, not ‘whatever.’ I catch you having sex in my cousin’s house—
my cousin’s house
, Heather—and now you won’t even talk to me. I should ground you for the rest of your damn life for that. You know what getting pregnant or getting AIDS would do? Do you even care?”

“We weren’t gonna have sex, we were just gonna do other stuff.”

He looked out the windshield. “You make me sick.”

Instantly, he regretted saying it. And he could tell it cut. He’d found that no matter how tough a daughter acted, no matter the armor covering her, a dad could always cut her.

“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean that. I’m just worried. We used to talk about everything, you know? Anytime you wanted to talk you never went to your friends, you always came to me. Now I can’t get two words out of you.”

“I wanna go home.”

“Sweetie, I told you, we’ll just stay half an hour and say hello before—”

“No, I wanna go
home
,” she said, looking up at him.

“Home as in California?”

“I miss my friends. I miss Aunt Sarah.”

Baudin didn’t have the heart to tell her Aunt Sarah didn’t give a shit. She was his wife’s sister, and after his wife was gone it was as if he and Heather never existed. One day, out of the blue, he’d gotten a call from Sarah asking that he not bring Heather around anymore. It was too painful, she said. Too painful… Baudin’d had some choice words for her, and they hadn’t spoken since.

“This is our home now, Heather. I promise that if you give it a chance, it will grow on you. I promise it will.”

Dixon’s home seemed nice, far nicer than he would’ve guessed for a cop’s salary. He waited for Heather outside the car as she texted someone on her phone and then stepped out. Baudin knocked, and a beautiful brunette answered with a pearly smile.

“Hi, you must be Ethan. I’m Hillary, Kyle’s wife.”

“Nice to finally meet you. This is my daughter, Heather.”

“Heather, it is so nice to meet you.”

“Thanks,” Heather said, not looking up from her shoes.

She opened the door wider. “Well, come in, everyone’s here.”

In the front room, a crowd of men were gathered around a television.

“Hey,” Dixon shouted, “this is my partner, Ethan Baudin.”

A few people said hello, and he nodded back. He recognized some of them from the precinct, but most he didn’t. They were wearing baseball caps and T-shirts with the same team’s logo. Baudin had once read a book on primate behavior that said they acted in groups because they were insecure as individuals. He tried to push that type of thought from his mind but couldn’t. The thoughts were always there, and he would make connections, much of the time without wanting to.

“Heather,” Hillary said, “this is my niece, Anna.”

A young girl of twelve or thirteen was standing against the wall. “Hey,” she said.

“Hey,” Heather replied.

And just like that, they began talking—mostly about the schools they went to and if they knew any of the same people. Baudin stood by until Anna said, “Let’s go out back.”

The girls made their way through the house. That ability to instantly make friends was something he had never had in his life. As a child, he had been painfully shy, and bouncing from foster home to foster home left him unwilling to ever get too close. Whoever he happened to care about, who were few anyway, would eventually leave.

“Pull up a seat,” Dixon said.

Baudin sat down in a folding chair. Within a few seconds, everyone exploded when something happened on the television. The noise was so sudden it startled him and filled him with anxiety. Rather than showing it, he rose and walked into the kitchen with his hands in his pockets as though just looking around.

Hillary was preparing snacks. She smiled at him as she went from the oven to the toaster and back.

“She’s cute,” she said.

Baudin saw where she was looking. Just outside, past a line of trees, Heather and Anna were on swings, another young girl, younger than them, leaning against the swing set and staring at the other two.

“She’s my heart.”

“Will her mother be coming?”

Baudin hesitated. “Her mother passed.”

She stopped what she was doing and looked at him. “I’m sorry. I hadn’t heard.”

“What about your little one?”

She turned back around. “He’s at his grandma’s. He’s really sensitive to noise, so I thought it better for him to be there during all this.” She glanced at him and then back at the food. “You’re not into sports, are you? I can tell.”

“How do you know I’m not just new and don’t have skin in the game yet?”

“No, I can tell. You don’t care.”

He turned to the sliding glass doors, watching the girls. “It seems like what men are supposed to do.”

“Some men. But not you.”

He grinned. “No, not me… Do you have a bathroom I could use?”

“Sure. Just down the hall, right there.”

Baudin strolled down the hall, taking his time, studying all the photos. Dixon was a hunter, and there were at least thirty photos of him out in the woods or with a kill or smiling while wearing green and brown camouflage. In one photo, he held the head of a massive buck and was smiling widely at the camera. Baudin could see the ragged edges of flesh on the head. The deer hadn’t been killed efficiently; something had torn the head off the body. Probably a cougar, and Dixon had found it later.

The bathroom was small and white, with a blue rug and blue toilet seat cover. Baudin shut the door behind him and stared at himself in the mirror. He turned the faucet on and splashed cold water on his face before exhaling loudly, his elbows resting on the sink. He used the new towel on the rack to dab at his face, taking his time drying it. When he was through, he stepped into the hallway.

There was an office across the hall. Baudin went in and sat at the desk. He leaned back, staring at a poster of Dirty Harry on the wall. The poster made him grin, mostly because it was Dixon’s. He wondered if the movie was responsible for his becoming a cop, as it had been for an entire generation of young men.

He turned on the desktop computer, opened the browser, and looked in the history. The most recent things searched had been several conspiracy theory sites. Baudin typed in an address for his favorite blog: a government worker who allegedly worked for the CIA but wrote a blog about all the deviant acts of the government. His superiors, according to him, had spent $58 million the previous year trying to track him down and weren’t able to do it. Baudin bookmarked the site, leaving it open when he rose.

The bookshelf in the corner drew his attention next. He didn’t think there was any better way to know what a person was thinking than to look at their bookshelf. Dixon’s was filled with biographies of athletes and presidents, a handful of civil war histories, and a multi-volume work translating the Bible into modern vernacular.

He stepped back out into the hall and heard voices.

Without making a sound, he crept closer to the kitchen. Hillary was arguing with one of the men Baudin had seen when coming in. He couldn’t hear what they were arguing about—it was one of those conversations that was shouted in angry whispers—but he made out the words, “He’s mine, too.”

The two of them stopped the moment they saw someone else was in the room. Baudin looked into the man’s eyes. Not a quick glance—a real, long look, seeing what was there.

“Chris, I don’t think you’ve met Ethan. This is my husband’s partner.”

“Pleasure,” he said.

“Likewise.”

“Chris is our neighbor.”

The two were so awkward, so absolutely uncomfortable, that Baudin knew instantly what the problem was.

“Well, better get back,” Baudin said. “Nice meeting you.”

He waited a few minutes in the front room while everyone was dipping dried meats and chips in the cheese and guacamole dip. Baudin watched Dixon, the way he would interact with others and get them to laugh, and always be willing to render support when they felt others were teasing them. Everyone seemed to like him. Baudin, despite himself, liked him, too.

Baudin went back to the kitchen. Hillary was busy with the food again and something she had simmering on the stove.

“How long has it been going on?” he asked.

“Excuse me?”

He held her gaze. “You’re a cop’s wife. You can’t hide things like that forever. He’ll find out.”

“You don’t know anything about me,” she said, anger in her voice.

“No, I don’t.”

She put her hand over her eyes, rubbing her temples. “I think I’d like you to leave my home.”

He nodded. “Of course.” He went to the sliding glass doors and opened it. “Heather, let’s go, baby.”

Baudin thought she would put up a fight, but she said bye to her new friend and hurried over. She followed him to the front room, where he said, “Got an appointment to keep. Better bounce.”

“Now?” Dixon said. “It’s the first quarter.”

“I’m sure the recap will be on ESPN. I’ll see ya.”

He left without any fanfare and no other goodbyes. When they were walking to the car, Heather said, “I miss my friends in LA.”

“I know, baby,” he said, getting into the driver’s seat. “I do, too.”